“... make ourselves comfortable. It shows off the materials we have tamed and now like to live among: wood, pewter, tile, china, feathers, wicker, wool. And like other Dutch paintings of this extraordinary century, it sends you skittering through time. Are we with Whistler? With Cézanne? With Munch? It is a picture – like many here – from which one looks ...”

“... which he, a Jew, had experienced at first hand, in Austria, Germany and Holland. As his friend Michael Hamburger wrote, ‘no wonder Jakov Lind has become a specialist in the monstrous!’ The Continent was insupportable, he couldn’t live in Israel, indomitable Churchillian England was the place for him. And yet what brought him over was the most ...”

“... she performed at Carnegie Hall and spoke from the platform during the March on Washington. (Ean Wood wonders if Langston Hughes, who knew Baker in Paris in the 1920s, had her in mind when he included the verse ‘Look at that gal shake that thing./We can’t all be Martin Luther King’ in the second edition of his anthology, The Poetry of the Negro; the ...”

“... 19 March. It got going just before 10 a.m. and lasted until nearly one o’clock. Anyone who knows Michael Heseltine knows that he is a rapid dispatcher of business, even by senior ministerial standards. To spend three hours wondering how to answer a couple of letters is blue-moonish, and speaks volumes about the concern to hide. ‘This was a long meeting by ...”

“... has generally been supposed. Later on, a cluster of young historical ecologists based at Monks Wood Experimental Station, outside Huntingdon, deepened and widened some of Hoskins’s pioneer perceptions, adding support to them with biological data. Beginning to overtake all of these in practical effectiveness, however, is the remarkable figure of Oliver ...”

“... neck, a kicking hind leg, a pair of ears. The forms are concave, as though knocked out of soft wood with a chisel. In a way, his animals are always the same animal: energetic but sleepily lovable (they seem to have closed eyes and adorable eyelashes), active but unthreatening, heroic, emblematic; not individuals but successful prototypes. Closer to God ...”

“... bookshelves. A Constructivist sculpture, like a demonic snowflake, made by King from black painted wood. Soviet artefacts: a silk banner, a crimson alarm clock, hammer-and-sickle badges. A fleet of scarlet filing cabinets holding photographs, documents and journals. And modern objects which nodded to the Reds: a scarlet drawing board, a scarlet rubbish bin, a ...”

“... to understand the person’s features in motion over time. That hadn’t always been the case. Michael Wishart, the son of Freud’s lover Lorna Wishart, said that when Freud was young, you couldn’t blink while he was painting your thumb or he became ‘distressed’. The majority of Freud’s prints, made three and a half decades later, were part of a ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... about carving. It’s funny, but not altogether harmless, a slightly darker take on Under Milk Wood, as it might be. The word ‘heavy’ has a lot to do with it. As for the English, the book is so stuffed with digs at them that one never has long to wait: ‘He shook hands like a limp rag and looked down his nose at me with his big popping eyes and said ...”

“... Holder whiskers, the period of ‘Exposure’, of ‘long-haired and thoughtful’, of the ‘wood-kerne’ and the ‘inner émigré’. But the cheekbones are there. And a listener for sure. ‘You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note,’ he has the ghost of Joyce address him in the marvellous ‘Station Island’ sequence from 1984. Tweed ...”

“... and fascinating claim, with radical implications for the historiography of the period. Michael Thompson has had something of the same intuition about Victorian society, and it is one of several themes in his new book which makes this much more than the undergraduate or A-level toolkit which it might appear to be. We know a great deal about the ...”

“... From Right and Left (1929): ‘In the gloaming, only the silver birches in the little wood opposite would shimmer, standing amongst the other trees like slips of days amongst ancient nights.’ Joseph Roth was born in 1894 on the rim of the Habsburg Empire in Brody, Austrian Galicia, which is now part of Ukraine. (He may well be related to the ...”

“... they can’t plant woods, only plantations. Even under trees grown next to an existing ancient wood, plants such as oxlip spread by only about a metre a year, and then only if the right kind of ant is present to carry the seeds. There is no use thinking you can provide species that don’t like the heat with an escape from climate change by planting up ...”

“... Castle. On the cover of the recent paperback of Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood* there is a photograph of him as a little boy young enough to be in a frock, which was probably among the photographs he happened to look at through an old stereoscope, surprising himself into saying what a dear little fellow he had been. Quite ...”